Though since I made this journal, https://www.weasyl.com/journal/38082/why-i-m-not-an-atheist and that one https://www.weasyl.com/journal/38083/atheist-zealots I've lost the burning desire to continue, I don't feel right not finishing. I've kind of gotten through my "R.E.M.-style crisis of faith" as one friend put it. As my health has improved, I don't feel like I'm dying, and the exact same ideas don't seem nearly as grim. So there won't be as much angst and anger in this as there would have been, which probably is for the best.

Let's talk about what I think of as "Science Fanbois".

I'm not sure what would make one a "fan" of science, but anything can have its annoying "fanbois" and science is no exception. The thing is, many of them seem to be atheists, or in the skeptic community. If they're not atheist zealots per se, they seem to have felt a hole without religion and filled it with belief in science. Here's the traits I've observed in what I call "Science Fanbois":

1. Rose-Colored Lab Goggles
Scientists are their heros, and the scientific method is something they'll speak of glowingly: how the most courageous people in the world are the scientists, who use the Scientific Method of carefully examining all data before making hypotheses, constantly trying to disprove them (unlike you or me or the all the "flakes" out there who come up with ideas and try to prove them) so all that is left is the truth.

...this just doesn't resemble what scientists actually do. They're human. There's politics. They champion pet theories and sometimes "Science moves forward one funeral at a time" it's said. The guy who figured out in the 1840s washing your hands cuts down on disease had to push, push, push the idea his whole life to get doctors to actually do it. The guy who figured out stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria had to infect himself and get an ulcer and then cure it with antibiotics, before anyone believed him. (there's probably some good non-medical examples but I can't think of them off the top of my head)

...then there's the science frauds, the ones who fabricate data, publish fake studies for years and years before they're caught. (An unknown amount of scientific papers and ideas used their work, and more papers referenced those, and so on; rooting it all out is going to be a nightmare!) The Science Fanbois have had their heros turn out to be falliable, and just turn a blind eye to it.

To be fair, a lot of the science writers I like (such as Phil Plait) are guilty of this kind of "science fanboism", they're just not obnoxious about it. The problem is, I just can't reconcile their idealized vision of the scientific method with the lurid tales of academic politics and fraud... the reality is probably somewhere in-between.

2. The Science Religion
Science Fanbois soak up anything scientific. They might not understand the concepts (they might be laymen who suffered through math class), but their heros are the great scientists of legend, men like Issac Newton and Einstein, and this cult of celebrity is I think what the religious folks who say "Atheism is a religion too!" take notice of.

It's not a full-blown religion yet, but when people speak of Galileo like he was the First Martyr of the True Faith, thump Darwin's The Origin of Species like it was their Bible, follow in his footsteps on vacation to the Galapagos Islands like it was a Holy Pilgrimage, create ever-more virtuous and heroic ideas of who the Founding Fathers of Science were... I start to wonder: am I witnessing the birth of a new religion?

3. Belief In "Science!"
The biggest fans of Science blindly believe anything that is declared to be Science, or feels "sciency". They're enthused by genetically-modified food because that's more "science" than plain old ordinary crops or organic food. They love drones and robots because they're more "science" than having a human or old-fashioned machine do the same job. New medications, new vaccines, faster jets, faster computers, space travel, deep-sea voyages, taller buildings, longer bridges... all the way up to Transhumanism, a whole other subculture I like the idea of, but don't share the blind enthusiasm.

On the one hand, I love keeping up with this stuff, and share in the utopian vision, that we still have plenty of room for technological progress to make our lives better and better, but on the other hand, there's a point where I'm skeptical, but these people... there just doesn't seem to be any limit to how "Frankenstein" the science can get. Tomatos spliced with fish genes, glowing rats, goats that make spider silk in their milk, cockroaches with microchips controlling their nervous system, the idea of harvesting embroyonic stem cells from abortions, whatever it is, if it's "Science" they're all for it.

And it's at this point, my definition of "skepticism" differs from theirs. Because many of these people define themselves as the true "skeptics", in their minds, the slightest resistance places me in the same camp as the "quacks" who believe in "woo".

It's about here in the big venn diagram of Atheism that Science Fanbois and Uber-Skeptics overlap...